Nov. 7, 2018, 2:25 p.m.

Pundits labeled 2018 the second “Year of the Woman,” a nod to the historic number of women that ran for office Tuesday. The first “Year of the Woman,” of course, was 1992, when Anita Hill was humiliated and ignored and five whole women were elected to the 100-person Senate. Twenty-six years later, the headlines are similarly rapturous. We elected more than 115 women, breaking a zillion records!

We owe these female candidates — and those who organized on their behalf — a debt of gratitude for expanding our vision, often at great personal risk.

But I’m not exactly running down the streets singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Since I simply cannot resist ruining a happy moment, dozens of women dotted across the country does not a revolution make. At press time, women had won 22% of the House seats, 12% of the Senate seats and 9% of the gubernatorial seats. We continue to make up 51% of the population.

Nov. 7, 2018, 8:23 a.m.

Orange County stayed red - for now - in the blue state of California. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

For all the recent talk about the demographic and political shifts underway in Orange County, Tuesday was a snap back to reality. Yes, Democrats have made strides, but Republicans still dominated election day.

While it looks like Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) may have lost his seat after three decades and a Democrat will replace Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) in a district that spans Orange and San Diego counties, Republicans either held onto or won open seats that Democrats had hoped to take, including Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Beach) winning reelection and Young Kim taking the open seat currently held by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton).

Nov. 7, 2018, 7:48 a.m.

The Democrats narrowly won control of the House on Tuesday. They now have a chance to change the tone of Washington. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

In the end Tuesday’s election results went about as expected, though not nearly as well for the Democrats as they had hoped. The took back control of the House, yes, but by a slim margin, and lost a couple more seats in the Senate. As waves go, well, it wasn’t exactly good for surfing.

So what now? The Democrats are in a position to effect change, but not necessarily in the manner they had hoped. With a split Congress, voters can expect little to get accomplished on significant issues. Immigration reform? Stalled. Repealing or adding tax cuts? Nothing doing. Changes to the Affordable Care Act? No prescriptions available.

Local soda taxes have been bubbling up all over the country as studies trickle in from places like Berkeley indicating that soda taxes really do decrease soda consumption. That’s good for public health advocates hoping to curb the rising rates of obesity and diabetes.

Nov. 6, 2018, 2:30 p.m.

Elise Hall, the author's niece, votes for the first time in Los Angeles County. (Carla Hall / Los Angeles Times)

I spend a lot of time urging people to vote. But it occurred to me (on Monday) that I had never delivered that message to my niece, Elise Hall, who turned 18 in July. Was she even registered to vote?

Elise graduated from high school this past spring and now juggles a job and classes at a local college. I knew she was civic-minded; in high school, she volunteered her time and expertise doing hair and makeup for women in homeless shelters. But I had a feeling that voter registration might not have been on her to-do list.

Turns out that she had registered online — good for her! — or at least she tried to. She got back a form saying she still had to sign something. I looked her up on lavote.net and she wasn’t listed as registered. That didn’t surprise me. Maybe her name hadn’t made it into the system yet.

Nov. 6, 2018, 2:13 p.m.

President Trump's immigration enforcement policies have pushed the court backlog to more than 1 million cases. (Jabin Botsford/Washington Post)

You have to give credit to the Trump administration when it’s due. The increased pace of arrests of people living in the country illegally, combined with the order to reopen suspended cases, has pushed the backlog of pending immigration court cases to nearly 1.1 million, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

That’s more than double the backlog when Trump took office, and comes despite a 30% increase in the number of immigration judges.

In Wasteland Express, players buy and sell goods at various outposts to generate the profits they need to win. But once they sell something to any given outpost, they can’t go back with their next truckload of goods — the transaction was so acrimonious, the buyers won’t do business with them.

In recent weeks, the president has said things about individual Democrats and the Democratic Party in general that suggest he won’t be doing business with them next year. Take, for instance, these three tweets he made Saturday, then retweeted Tuesday morning:

Nov. 6, 2018, 10:59 a.m.

Voters in Washington state will decide whether to charge large industrial emitters a carbon pollution fee to address climate change. (Associated Press)

With Washington, D.C., unlikely to act on climate change any time soon, voters in Washington state Tuesday are deciding whether to impose the nation’s first carbon tax.

Initiative 1631 would charge a “fee” (basically a tax) on large emitters of greenhouse gases, such as oil companies and electric utilities. The money raised from the fee would be used to develop renewable energy, electric vehicle infrastructure, energy efficiency programs and other projects designed to reduce carbon emissions. The state could eventually raise $1 billion a year by 2025 — money that could help transform the state’s infrastructure and economy.

This is the second time voters in Washington have considered a carbon tax. Voter rejected a 2016 initiative that would have levied a higher carbon tax on fossil fuels but refunded all the revenue through tax cuts and rebates.

Nov. 6, 2018, 10:44 a.m.

Expect to see some fast vacancies in the Trump administration after the election. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

I tend not to make too many predictions about elections because it’s too easy to be wrong, too hard to be right, and in the end it doesn’t matter because the elections will turn out the way they’ll turn out (give or take a Russian thumb or two on the scale).

So let’s move to the second-most interesting thing tied to the election: who President Trump will fire, and when.

As I got out of the YMCA pool early Monday morning, the lifeguard — a young man most likely still in college — said he was still bothered by Sunday’s shift from daylight saving time to standard time. So, I asked, you’ll be voting for Proposition 7 tomorrow?

Evidently, this was the first time anyone had mentioned that proposition to him. From the look on his face, I wondered if he realized that Tuesday was election day.

Regardless, after I told him that the measure would let the Legislature vote to end the time changes and put us on daylight saving time permanently, with Congress’ approval, he had the zeal of the converted. As I dripped my way to the locker room, I heard him calling out to other swimmers getting out of their lanes, “Vote yes on Prop. 7! Vote yes on Prop. 7!”